The hard part of practising Excel on your own is rarely the formula. It's having data worth working on, and a question to answer with it. These seven workbooks are fictional but shaped like the files people get sent at work, and each has a Tasks sheet of questions to answer. The lookup and pivot sets include answers. No email address needed, and each card links to the in-browser exercise for the same skill.
A 60-product catalog and a separate order log that only records SKUs — built for lookup practice. Pull prices into the orders with VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP, then compute order totals.
180 rows · SKU · Product · Category · Unit Price · In Stock
Free · fictional data · opens in Excel and Google Sheets
A year of orders for a fictional office-supplies company — regions, reps, categories, quantities and totals. The classic pivot table dataset; also good for SUMIF, sorting and filtering.
350 rows · Order ID · Date · Region · Sales Rep · Product · Category · Units · Unit Price · Total
Free · fictional data · opens in Excel and Google Sheets
150 employees across departments and offices, with start dates and salaries. Practice lookups by ID, IF logic on salary bands, sorting, filtering, and date arithmetic.
150 rows · Employee ID · Full Name · Department · Office · Start Date · Annual Salary
Free · fictional data · opens in Excel and Google Sheets
A customer export the way real exports arrive: inconsistent casing, stray spaces, duplicate rows, and numbers stored as text. Practice TRIM, PROPER, Flash Fill and de-duplication.
128 rows · Customer Name · Email · City · Country · Signup Date · Monthly Spend
Free · fictional data · opens in Excel and Google Sheets
Three months of daily sessions and signups across five marketing channels. Practice AVERAGEIF and SUMIFS, computed columns like conversion rate, and summarizing by month.
450 rows · Date · Channel · Sessions · Signups
Free · fictional data · opens in Excel and Google Sheets
Twelve months of spending across six categories in tidy long format. A gentle beginner set: totals per month with SUMIF, per-category averages, and share-of-total percentages.
72 rows · Month · Category · Amount
Free · fictional data · opens in Excel and Google Sheets
A 40-line delivery note to type into a blank stock sheet: Tab and Enter, a total that checks your work, the fill handle for line numbers, then the clock.
40 rows · Item · Qty · Shelf
Free · fictional data · opens in Excel and Google Sheets
Start from a question, not from the file. "Which region sold the most?" is a pivot table. "What's the price of this SKU?" is a lookup. "Why do these totals disagree?" is a cleaning job. Each workbook's Tasks sheet gives you questions like these in rising difficulty; work them in order and check yourself against the answers where the workbook has them.
If you'd rather have your work checked as you go, each file's skill has an interactive practice page: lookups, pivots, cleaning, formulas and more, in a spreadsheet in your browser that checks every step.
All data is generated: every company, name, email and number is made up. Use the files in courses, workshops and training materials without attribution. They open in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice.
The free Excel test works in this same spreadsheet and adapts as you go, so it finds your level instead of walking a fixed list of questions. You see your level at the end; a free account shows which skills you already hold and where to start.
Take the free Excel test